What’s war good for? It’s made a more peaceful world

For all the horror and brutality of battle, war has a surprising upside – it helps create larger and safer societies, argues a leading historian

By Ian Morris

Murderous times but, overall, less violent than the Stone Age

(Image: Hulton-Deutsch Collection/CORBIS)

“SINCE I have been at the Foreign Office I have not seen such calm waters,” Britain’s permanent under secretary for foreign affairs announced in May 1914.

He was wrong, of course. Just three months later, Europe launched into an orgy of killing. By 1945, close to 100 million people had been killed in conflict and a nuclear arms race had begun. As we stand at the centenary of the outbreak of the first world war, with civil war raging in Syria and Russian tanks massing on Ukraine’s borders, the last 100 years seem to have been the worst of times – and yet they have clearly also been the best of times. Difficult as it may be to believe, rates of violent death are lower now than they have ever been.

Just 30 years ago, when US president Ronald Reagan branded the Soviet Union an “evil empire”, this claim would have seemed laughable. The findings of the last three decades of anthropology, archaeology and history, however, all point to the same conclusions&colon; first, that there has been a spectacular, long-term decline in rates of violent death, and second, that this decline is accelerating.

The Stone Age world, we now know, was a rough place. Ten thousand years ago, if someone decided to use force to settle an argument, there were far fewer constraints on him – or, occasionally, her – than citizens of functioning modern states are used to. Most of the killing was on a small scale, in homicides, vendettas and raids, but because populations were ...

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